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Giacomo Puccini's life

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) is considered one of the highest opera composer in history.His music doesn't seem to present the clear innovative tension of other European composers of his age. The reason is mainly because he commits almost entirely to theatrical music and, unlike the twenty century avant-garde masters, he composes with special attention to the public, personally looking after the sets and following his operas around the world. His music is characterized by psychological intensity and bright setting expedients. According to tradition, he decides to commit to musical theatre in 1876 after watching Giuseppe Verdi's Aida in Pisa. Thanks to a grant, he studies at the Conservatory of Milan. Among his teachers there are Ponchielli and Bazzini. His third opera, Manon Lescaut, receives an impressive success and is the beginning of the amazing collaboration with librettist Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, with whom Puccini writes the libretti of the following three operas: La boheme, Tosca and Madama Butterfly. In 1906, Giacosa's death puts and end to the collaboration of the three which has given life to the previous masterpieces.He deeply admires Wagner, in fact his first compositions have clear thematic references to Wagner's operas. He also draws from French operas for the extreme care to local and historical topics, usually not commonly found in Italian operas, through a musical set of the ambiances, widely characterizing his every work. He dies in Bruxelle in 1924, leaving his operaTurandot incomplete.

Curiosities

Puccini's La Bohème

They say La Bohème is the perfect opera. For some reason it really is. There isn't a single note of this amazing musical sheet by Giacomo Puccini which isn't essential. For over a century, the story of Mimì and Rodolfo has moved audiences all over the world, in a beautiful combination of feelings (without becoming a slush) and eternal melodies. And it is the irrevocable testing ground for every great interpreter. Puccini, with his second masterpiece, after Manon Lescaut, and the two previous very interesting attempts of Le Villi and Edgar, proves to be very modern, looking out for the Twentieth Century (this opera is dated 1896). The music forges the atmosphere, like in a great Impressionist picture, and you'll be overflowed with the typical tradition of the great Italian melodrama. The story of young people looking for happiness, love and personal fulfilment, without being rhetorical, is real and actual, now more than ever. In the tragic finale, when Mimì dies of an inevitable death, painful just like all kind of losses, they approach the passage to adult life, the responsibility with it, painful as only growing up can be. Wether it is set in Paris in 1830 (the time of the libretto), or in modern times, La Bohème tells about real life and Puccini decorates it with timeless music.

Puccini's Madama Butterfly

Madama Butterfly is a central opera in Giacomo Puccini's production, maybe the most loved by the composer, definitely the most tormented on a creativity level, since it was often subject to changes and improvements. Butterfly is painfully modern, fully dipped in the Twentieth Century cultural and artistic climate (the opera is dated 1904). Puccini's harmonic suggestions are brave and refined, with extraordinary melodies. The story of Butterfly is brutal and psychologically violent. Looking at it closely, it tells about sexual tourism almost a century in advance. Cio-cio-san's solitude is the same as that of every heroins written by Puccini: doomed to an unhappy destiny. With Expressionistic elans, through sound flows, tear apart the greatest masterpiece by the composer, making way for the second part of his creative path: Fanciulla del West, Trittico and Turandot.

Puccini's Il Trittico - Gianni Schicchi, Suor Angelica, Il Tabarro

Puccini's Trittico (which includes Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi) was first put on stage at the Metropolitan in New York on December 14 in 1918 and it is a great piece of work of the last period of the author's creative drive and a masterpiece of musical Nineteenth Century. Composed by three parts, which Puccini wanted it to be represented always together but are often shown separately instead, Il Trittico has death as main theme: tragic in Il Tabarro, desperate and painful with spiritual traits in Suor Angelica, comical and with a dark humour in Gianni Schicci. In Il Tabarro, Puccini's music is theatrical and modern, perfect to convey the atmosphere of the story, so it is for Suor Angelica's “cruel melodies”. And for Gianni Schicchi, the words turn the music in a jewel, where Florence's perfume and the humour of its people is almost tangible. After this work, there was Turandot and Puccini, now perfectly set in his time, couldn't solve the Princess's enigma and also of his own Art.

Puccini's Tosca

Tosca is set exactly a century before it was put on stage for the first time, in Rome, on the 14th January 1900 at Teatro Costanzi. It is, in fact, set in the same city after the fall of the first Roman Republica, established by the French in the year 1800. It is one of the most beautiful and famous opera by Giacomo Puccini. The libretto was written by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica and it is based on the drama La Tosca by Victorien Sardou (which was put on stage for the first time in 1887 at Théatre de la Porte-Saint-Martin of Paris), whose success was given primarily by Sarah Bernhardt's performance while playing the protagonist. The idea of writing an opera based on the drama had come to mind many years before to the Maestro from Lucca. Puccini had been, in fact, charmed by the actions, the truthful passions at stake and the strength of the events, even though he had initially grown distant from the project. So Maestro Franchetti took agreements with Sardou for the rights to put it into music and asked Illica to write the libretto, which was at first written in a very short time. There was much discussion regarding the taken away parts, the substitutions and the various changes but Puccini's music managed to hide what in the drama, meaning the prose, had come up as faults. Tosca represents the most "concentrated" opera by Puccini - apart from the 3 acts of the Trittico, for its ability to keep the audience tight on its seat from the very first line to the last one. One of the reason was definitely the ingenuity with whom the changes and the transposition of important narrative parts from one scene to another were made. The very Sardou defined it superior compares to his own original drama.

Puccini's Turandot

Turandot is Giacomo Puccini's last unfinished masterpiece, put on stage for the first time at Teatro alla Scala of Milan on April 26 in 1926, a year and a half after its author's death (Bruxelles 29 November 1924). The final duet between Calaf and Turandot and the scene closing the opera, were put on music, based on Puccini's notes, by the musician Franco Alfano. His first draft (preferable) was shortened up by Toscanini and it is the version more represented nowadays. In 2002 Luciano Berio has written a new finale of the opera. In Turandot, an absolute musical masterpiece of the Twentieth Century, Puccini proves to be careful and sensitive to the new musical fashion of his time; in the sheet music we are not short of flashes of expressionism and discordant intervals, while still being full of marvellous aria (Liù's ones for example) which always flow in a constant musical discourse with no pauses. It is said that the piccolo arrangement which closes the funeral procession of Liù (the last notes written by Puccini) celebrates also the great funeral of opera, ending with this work, its “classical age”. It could be true...